All Time Record of 10TB Into HDD by HGST

Leveraging its data center storage insights, HGST, Inc., a Western Digital company,  announced six new offerings that will help organizations manage the increasing volume, velocity, variety and longevity of data in today’s rapidly evolving data center.

Data Transforms Storage Industry: Long Live Data
Data is the currency of the new economy. In today’s digital world, the use of data has transformed from simply recording transactions to using data to gain understanding, drive predictions, make real time decisions and offer new insights – giving businesses the ultimate competitive edge. As this change in use and consumption continues to accelerate, data centers must be optimized to capture or connect to larger amounts of data from new sources, and maintain accessibility to that data over longer periods of time. With the amount of data being created and replicated doubling every two years, storing, retaining, accessing and transforming massive volumes of data has placed storage at the heart of the data center. Storage must be faster, more elastic, more accessible and more affordable, and HGST is delivering those solutions that help the world harness the power of data.

HGST Extracts Value through ‘Device Affinity’
Building on its expertise in storage devices and technologies, HGST has developed methods to extract increased efficiencies, performance and reliability through software and firmware that provides tight, end-to-end integration of underlying device capabilities with higher level functions at the subsystem, system and application level. By leveraging this device affinity, solutions can be created with higher value over standalone devices.

Server-Side Clustering and Volume Management Software
Now available, HGST Virident Space allows clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices to deliver one or more shared volumes of flash storage with a total usable capacity of more than 38TB. The HA, mirrored cluster is configured and managed through a GUI. It is for shared storage applications like Oracle RAC and Red Hat Global File System that traditionally relied on dedicated SAN storage. It also provides MySQL environments with new levels of availability and efficiency where a single stand-by server can be deployed as an alternative to dedicated replication pairs, saving as much as 37% on total server count. By adding Virident Space to the shipping Virident ClusterCache for SAN acceleration, Virident Share for flash pooling and remote access to flash, and Virident HA for replication, HGST is delivering on the vision of a feature-rich and robust flash fabric solution. Virident Space is currently being tested by hyperscale and data center customers worldwide.

NVMe-compliant PCIe SSDs with Flexibility, Serviceability and Density
HGST’s NVMe-compliant Ultrastar SN100 PCIe SSD series will drive the next wave of server flash adoption with simplified system integration paired with HGST’s quality and reliability.

In addition, HGST will be implementing NVMe-compatible extensions aimed at leveraging device affinity by providing integration of value-add software that interfaces directly with the PCIe SSD’s NAND flash management. Ultrastar SN100 NVMe PCIe SSDs will be offered as a HH-HL add-in card, as well as a standard 2.5-inch drive form factor, with capacities up to 3.2TB. HGST is currently sampling the Ultrastar SN100 SSD series.

All Future HGST Enterprise Capacity HDDs With HelioSeal Platform
As the industry continues to push device capacities higher and higher, a transition to helium sealed HDD technology will become essential to achieving these increases while also maintaining reliability. HelioSeal platform represents innovation in high capacity HDD technology and reliability. Already adopted by top OEMs and the largest search, social and cloud service providers, the platform will be used for all future HGST capacity enterprise HDDs. As the only company to ship hermetically sealed, helium-filled HDDs, HGST provides with its helium platform a long-term path for delivering the highest capacities, while lowering power consumption and cooling, and providing the reliability demanded by data center operators.

8TB HDD Shipping, Delivering 33% More Capacity and 23% Lower Power
HGST’s 8TB Ultrastar He8 is the company’s second-generation helium-filled HDD.

It extends HGST’s leadership in delivering technology that advances the TCO value proposition for cloud data centers, enterprises, OEMs and system integrators. Outstripping what any HDD vendor can do using air, it enables more efficient data center designs and operations by reducing the physical and carbon footprint of the overall storage systems.

Addressing the largest data center challenges, the sealed, helium-filled HDDs enable lower power consumption and higher density storage systems, requiring less rack space. Additionally, they require less cooling and can be used more reliably in wider operating environments such as ambient data centers. Based on mainstream PMR technology, the Ultrastar He8 can be deployed into any application or environment without tradeoffs in performance or device compatibility. The Ultrastar He8 comes in both 8TB and 6TB capacities. The drives are currently being qualified by companies such as Netflix, Huawei, Inspur and Promise Technology as well as other OEMs and cloud customers.
    
First 10TB HDD With the Lowest $/TB and Watt/TB
HGST announces the world’s first 10TB HDD for cloud and cold storage applications.

This drive sets unprecedented capacity leadership at the lowest $/TB and watt/TB by harnessing two complementary technologies: HelioSeal technology and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). The additive nature of these two technologies enables the future design platform for HDDs in delivering higher capacity points at accelerated time-to-market entry. It also provides the foundation for all future scaling technologies, putting HGST on an accelerated path to delivering high capacities into existing and future form factor designs. HGST is currently sampling the new 10TB HDDs.

6TB Areal Density Leader Now Shipping, Providing Best $/TB
The Ultrastar 7K6000 is HGST’s seventh generation air-based platform, enabling industry performance at high capacities (5TB and 6TB) in a standard 3.5-inch HDD design.

Now shipping, the 6TB Ultrastar 7K6000 delivers 1.2TB per disk in a five-disk solution. Based on HGST’s proven and reliable platform, the Ultrastar 7K6000 family targets all traditional and growing scale out storage applications, including object, block and file storage architectures. It’s designed to help data center customers capture the growth and long-term value of data by providing capacity, 7,200rpm performance and the best $/GB acquisition cost. The drive is currently being qualified by cloud and OEM customers such as Huawei, Sugon and Nimble Storage.

Targets New Greenfield Storage Category: Active Archive
While deep archiving remains a write once and hope to read never practice, high growth applications and use cases are driving the emergence of new forms of long term storage. Social media, regulatory compliance and analytics, which demand ongoing random access to historical or long-tail data, are driving new requirements for high capacity data center storage. In addition to massive scalability, these environments require low cost and efficiency. Traditionally, tape has offered a low cost method for high capacity storage, but fails to provide fast access to random data sets. Mainstream disk-based storage can meet the performance requirements, but has not been able to meet the cost requirements for petabyte scale storage environments.

To address the market requirements for active archive solutions, HGST is driving new vectors of innovation to create active archive platforms that satisfy the demands in cost, performance, efficiency and reliability.

This new category of data center storage solution aims to provide a 10x increase in storage density and power efficiency compared to traditional enterprise data center solutions and a 5x increase in storage density and power efficiency compared to commonly used scale out cloud data center solutions. Targeting capacities of over 10PB in a single data center rack, active archive platform leverages device capacities along with additional points of device affinity that enable enhanced density, performance, efficiency and reliability. By doing so, the company aims to offer the lowest $/TB and Watts/TB in the highest capacity per rack available. Active archive platforms can be configured for a range of storage architectures including scale out object storage solutions for public and private cloud data centers.

HGST has begun sample delivery of the active archive platform to strategic partners. Complete details and specifications will be available in early 2015.

“At every step, we are innovating with purpose and pace to exceed the expectations of our customers by offering the broadest portfolio of SSDs, HDDs, software and solutions in the industry,” said Mike Cordano, president, HGST. “By providing complete solutions for both performance and capacity centric environments, we’re enabling our data center customers and partners to focus on developing new services and capabilities that drive competitive differentiation and profitability for their businesses. The products and solutions announced ensure that HGST sustains its heritage as the most trusted provider of innovative storage offerings to maintain market leadership.“